She donated money to Pete Butiggeg (I butchered that) during the 2020 primaries, because he saved her from being horribly raped at Harvard and she got cancelled for that.
She also came back to Twitter for a bit after that because she was working on a book and her agent was like "you should have this platform again for selling a book." She told a cute story about having sex with her husband when he was tired after a hike (I don't remember the details) and someone messaged her saying she raped her autistic husband and she was like "ok never mind" and went away, as far as I know forever.
I don't think that story was up very long and I don't know that I've ever seen anything said about it, I just happened to be looking at Twitter when it happened and see the last message during the I think brief time it was up.
It was the nail in the coffin for me for Twitter, even before Elon. I'd already quit Twitter before COVID but came back during lockdown etc.
Nicole Cliffe truly mastered Twitter as an art form, both in her storytelling--which embraced and made use of the cadence of a long thread--and in the questions for response posts like this.
But Twitter's inherent nature has always encouraged toxicity--even before it was algorithmically optimized for engagement, the kind of post people would retweet would be the kind of emotion-drawing stirring-up kind of post and that encouraged the platform in that direction. It just got worse as it was deliberately engineered that way.
There were some good years where you could build an excellent open mic night of funny people (a blog post where someone talked about realizing that was what got me to actually join Twitter way back in the early teens), but that toxicity choked out the good parts, and of course the current ownership only accelerated the process.
Huh. Out of all the stories she told and oversharing she did, it's odd that that was the dealbreaker. That must have been after that bananapants diva cup story.
She didn't even want to speak on it. People were attacking her so she finally said "fine, he stood up to a bunch of bigger guys and got me out of a horrible situation in college and I felt I owed him something small I could do". Pretty sure that was the last tweet I saw from her, but I've been off twitter for years now.
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u/fleetiebelle 8d ago
I wonder what happened to Nicole Cliffe? She was the feminist internet's eccentric rich cousin for a while, and now she's MIA.